M is for ...

Every single time we drive down a British motorway, I subject my wife to the same complaint, and I suspect she now mouths it along with me before I even say it.

The sign says the next services are “6m” away. Six metres. Or, if you prefer my other exasperated reading, six minutes. It is, of course, meant to be miles, but “m” is not the symbol for mile. It never has been. The correct abbreviation is “mi”. “m” is metres, a fact that has been settled since the 18th century and confirmed by the International System of Units since 1960.

Britain, the nation that gave the world Newton, the Royal Society, and the very foundations of the scientific method, cannot seem to get this right on its own road signs. I find this genuinely baffling. Even though it doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.

It gets worse once you look at the rest of the country’s measurement habits. We buy milk in pints but petrol in litres. We measure our height in feet and inches but our medicine doses in millilitres. Road distances are in miles, but race distances in athletics are in metres. Body weight gets discussed in stone at the doctor’s surgery, yet parcels are weighed in kilograms at the post office.

This is not a systematised approach to units. It is a historical accident wearing a lab coat. A hybrid, at best, like so much else in the country.

I would love a Britain that either commits fully to Imperial or fully to metric, and, at the very least, gets the mile symbol right on its own road signs. Small hope, I know.